Dec 7, 2010

Free Google Apps Mail Notifier (version 0.1)

If you have a Google Apps mail account, you may need a desktop tool that periodically checks your mailbox and notifies you when there are new messages. Keeping a browser window open at all times and manually refreshing it is really annoying.

Google has a such a tool, Gmail Notifier, but unfortunately it only works for regular Gmail accounts (@gmail.com) and not for Google Apps accounts (@yourdomain.com). Search engines find several independent implementations of such tools, but I have two main problems with all the tools I have seen:

None of those tools is free. (I don’t pay for the mail service itself. It’s ridiculous to have to pay for the notifications.)

None of those tools has its source code available, i.e. I cannot be sure what the tool does with my credentials

Therefore, I decided to write a Google Apps mail notification tool that is free of any charge and that is distributed as source code, so you can see what it does before you start using it. Feel free to adjust the source code (within the limits of the BSD license) to suit your needs better. Here is how to build the tool:

The tool needs two icon (.ico) files – your_alarm_icon.ico and your_quiet_icon.ico. The former icon is shown when you have unread messages and the latter one is shown when there are no unread messages. You have to provide these two files yourself. That is not as scary as it sounds – just search your system drive for ‘.ico’ and you’ll find plenty. Copy the two you like best and name them as required above. You will be able to replace them later if you want to without having to recompile the .exe, because they are loaded dynamically. Note: These two .ico files must reside in the same folder with the .exe.

To compile the source code, run the following command in a plain cmd window from the same directory where you saved the source file. (The entire command and arguments must be on one line):